1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems for estimating costs for printing of submitted print data and the like.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the commercial printing industry, in general, companies earn profits by receiving production orders from third parties (clients) for printed materials such as magazines, newspapers, catalogs, advertisements, and photo collections, producing printed materials requested by the clients, and then delivering the printed materials to the clients. Nowadays, large-scale printing machines such as offset presses are generally used in the industry.
In the commercial printing industry, various manufacturing processes are involved in printing procedures, such as document submission, design, layout, comprehensive layout (presentation of printer outputs), proofreading (layout correction and color collection), proof-printing, plate making, printing, postpress, and delivering. This is because once a printing plate is made, which is essential for using such a print press as mentioned above, it is difficult and expensive to make a correction on the printing plate, and thus elaborate proofing processes are necessary.
Thus, in the commercial printing industry, large-scale machines are necessary and it takes a long time to produce printed materials requested by clients.
On the other hand, there have been advances in the speed and quality of electrophotographic printing apparatuses and inkjet printing apparatuses. Along with these advances, the market for print-on-demand (POD) that uses image forming devices such as digital copying machines and digital multifunction machines has also been growing.
POD is aimed at handling relatively small-lot print jobs compared with general print runs in the traditional commercial printing industry without using large systems in short delivery periods. Thus POD makes good use of image forming devices instead of large-scale systems to realize digital printing of electronic data using Web services or the like which meet requests from clients.
In addition, in the POD industry, digitalized management and control of manufacturing processes and costs have been widespread. Under such a trend, there are several forms of service delivery such as PFP (print-for-pay) for print shops and CRD (centralized reproduction department), which is an in-house printing service for companies.
The traditional printing industry and POD industry also provide management services in which all business transactions are comprehensively carried out, including ordering of products (printed materials), packing, delivery, follow-up services, inventory control, and payment management.
In systems for providing such management services, methods of cost management are important to inform clients of the cost of producing requested printed materials. For example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-213471 discloses an apparatus and a method for performing a simulation of processing to be performed by an image forming device. In this apparatus, in order to estimate the amount of consumption of a consumable in actual use by performing simulation, an image formation command including information of a target image to be formed is acquired and the amount of consumption of the consumable is calculated from the acquired image.
However, the disclosed technique does not aim to clearly inform users of an estimate of the cost of whole printing processing, available print settings, and the costs of the settings before the users place print orders.
Supposing a case in which a user is allowed to place an order with an option in which printing is to be performed using information such as form information which has been registered beforehand in an image forming device, when the cost for such an order of form overlay printing is estimated by simulation, a device for performing simulation may read form data every time an estimate is requested and calculate the amounts of consumption of consumables used for a form-overlaid document. Such a simulation process takes a very long time to obtain an estimation result. Since it is likely that a user places an order while taking into account an estimation result, time-consuming simulation would result in a long time before the user actually places the order. This would significantly degrade the usability of a Web service.